The Small Town South Indian Boys of New York

It’s been a…mixed week, rough-ish, one of those where I am overwhelmed by the sheer talent everyone seems to possess relative to me but right now I am just going to quote half this article from Rolling Stone India (how fucking cool is it that India has a local version, I really do want to just move to Bombay and write for a magazine, sometimes). Seriously please just go read this they are the best. Okay here are my thoughts and everything is related back to me me me in this post I’m sorry but I just feel like they express feelings I have and it makes me love them SO MUCH. 

1. SOUTH INDIAN. THEY ARE SOUTH INDIAN.

2. They are siblings and they work together collaboratively. Holla at my sister. I would love to do this. <3 :D

3. “Me and my brother have had to create our personas and thoughts completely from scratch because there was not that much carried over. ‘Alright, I am just going to make up how to live this life, figuring out how to deal with girls and other things, smoking, drinking, sex,’” says Ashok about “inventing personas” and not being “reiterations of their parents.”

4. Ashok K on his first solo album, which will out later this month: It’s complicated in the sense that it is a weird sort of personal document is some ways. It is very based on being like this Indian kid from Queens, New York who grew up listening to a certain type of music. So it’s not going to make very much sense to people in other parts of the country.” [So in my fiction class this week I attempted to ~write what I know and put some of that out there and for the most part it b o m b e d spectacularly, haha. I mean, there were a thousand other things awful about this piece which I fully acknowledge but I truthfully felt a tad bit frustrated that a good number of people commented, “we don’t understand enough of what is going on and that alienates us”…idk, I feel like I sometimes like not knowing, because it’s insight into different cultures? Mm.]

5. [Ashok’s] wry cynicism is not of the Prozac-popping depressive brand or what he calls the “defeatist” kind, it is redemptive, an excuse for frivolity, goofy abandon and creative license. [Again, with relation to writing class sorry haha I am big on creative frustrations~~~ #fwp this week — see we can have good stories that aren’t terrifyingly edgy. Again idk, I feel uncomfortable making these demands because relatively speaking WHAT DO I KNOW]

6.“The complexity is – one, I am an American; two, I am not seen as an American all the time; three, the Indian relationship with the British is there and four, Indians in the UK are very different from the Indians in America; and I am going as an American, which is for me, mind-blowing,” he says. YEAH THIS. From uh six months in London and 3.5 years here (and like. books + media + popular culture representations, I guess) I see some sense of this. Cool that someone articulates it.

yeah okay the article ends a little awkwardly / abruptly (I think Rolling Stone features are usually quite good?) but I don’t care cos just. they get itttttt. <3